A few months ago we played the Turkish rip-off of Star Wars. Not just your average ripoff, mind you, but a film in which they actually stole chunks of Star Wars, and the theme to Raiders Of The Lost Ark, AND Moonraker… Welcome to filmmaking in a country that doesn’t subscribe to international copyright laws. Welcome to an industry that stole from its Hollywood masters out of sheer survival. Welcome to the wild, wild world of Turksploitation.
Our Turkish feature tonight is another glorious plundering of late 70s Hollywood, and you have to admire the tenacity of a producer trying to do a Hollywood special effects blockbuster for the price of a can of crab juice. It’s Supermen Return, or affectionately known as The Turkish Superman, featuring a man of steel so odd looking and so expressionless you’d swear he was one of those hypno-dolls hiding behind an enormous pair of toy spectacles.
Plot-wise it’s a direct rip: Superboy’s dispatched from his crumbling planet of Krypton, and is found by a kindly Turkish couple who raise him as their own and call him Tayfun. Once the secret of his past is revealed, he goes to work for a newspaper next to a gorgeous Margot Kidder substitute named Alev, whose father just happens to be Professor Metin specializing in the properties of kryptonite. Naturally there’s an arch villain (complete with villainous black duffle coat) who wants the kryptonite for his alchemy machine, and thus begins an endless succession of kidnappings – first the girl, then the professor, then Superman himself, who’s slowly learningto harness his abilities, including the power to see through women’s clothing.
Is it as bad as it sounds? Well, that depends on your concept of awful. Let’s just say it’s deliriously bad, in the best possible way, and for all its cheapdash chicanery and assiness, it does have an effective moment or two of action. You haven’t lived, people, till you’ve seen the Turkish Superman rear projected onto a dark room full of Christmas decorations, or heard distorted music thieved from at least six James Bond films – and of course the 1978 Superman. Seriously, if Christopher Reeves was alive today he’d be spinning in his wheelchair, and that’s exactly what your head will be doing as we head with capes flying into Turksploitation country with The Turkish Superman.
Primitives
Indonesia 1978 colour
aka Primitif, Savage Terror
Director Sisworo Gautama Putra Writer Imam Tantowi
Cast Enny Haryono (Rita), “Berry”/Barry Prima (Robert), Johann Mardjono (Tommy), Rukman Herman (Bisma)
It’s hard to believe that a devoutly religious country such as Indonesia would have such a thriving film industry specializing in sex and horror. Well it does, and next to the Philippines, was one of the largest exporters of genre films. Rapi Films, still Indonesia’s largest film company, was founded in 1968 as an importer of American and European movies. In 1971 they branched into feature films and by the late 70s were successfully dubbing into English their more salacious fare – outrageous gore-soaked horrors, sexploitation and action films – and selling them all over the world. Rapi Films’ own bona fide superstar Barry Prima would feature in most of their exports, such as our 1978 feature Primitives… but more on that later.
Meanwhile the Italians were running around South East Asia creating their own Third World atrocities. The cannibal film, one of the most despicable of horror’s sub-genres, was in full swing, having emerged from the Italians’ own Mondo or Shockumentary genre, in which primitive rituals and nature’s inherent barbarism were packaged with snide narration and pompously ironic soundtracks for modern middle class audiences to be titillated by in the smug comfort of their multiplex. From the Mondo Cane films came Man From Deep River in 1972, a blatant reworking of A Man Called Horse, in which a white man becomes accepted into a cannibal tribe and experiences their savagery first hand. Italian director Ruggero Deodato subsequently delivered a pair of similarly-themed films which would define and dominate the relatively short-lived Cannibal Genre: The Last Cannibal World in 1976, and Cannibal Holocaust in 1979. For the next few years, natives chowing down on entrails would become a defining image for not only European but international horror.
The Indonesians decided to beat the Italians at their own game and rip THEIR ideas off for once. Rapi Films set to work to remake The Last Cannibal World on home turf and, for added measure, claimed the story was based on an actual incident (and seriously, from outside Indonesia, how could you ever prove it?). Four anthropology students bribe a guide against his better judgement to take them deep into cannibal territory to peer at the Pangayan tribe close up. Their boat crashes and they’re savaged by wild animals, only to find their hosts aren’t as welcoming as they’d hoped. And while sitting in bamboo cages waiting to be the tribal feast, altruistic thoughts of trying to civilize them turn a little sour…
Deodato’s plot is plundered mercilessly right down to identical scenes and you could almost swear certain shots. Without the director’s flair, however, the entire exercise is stripped back to its basest of elements, though shots of natives chewing the heads off lizards and a mother chewing through her own umbilical cord are made slightly less lurid by the film’s Third World context. Yes, the natives are revolting – and it’s this kind of cultural revolution that makes for some very jarring Schlock Treatment viewing, and not just because of the completely out of place Jarre-like soundscapes and robotic disco. We ask ourselves “who are the real savages” and – holy crap – it turns out to be us, as we chow down on the 1978 Indonesian cannibal flick Primitives.
aka La Frusta E Il Corpo, What, Night Is The Phantom, Son Of Satan
Director “John M. Old”/Mario Bava Writers “Julian Berry”/Ernesto Gastaldi, “Robert Hugo”/Ugo Guerra, “Martin Hardy”/Luciano Martino
Cast Daliah Lavi (Nevenka Menliff), Christopher Lee (Kurt Menliff), Tony Kendall (Christian Menliff), “Isli Oberon”/Ida Galli (Katia), “Alan Collins”/Luciano Pigozzi (Losat)
We are proud to present two early films from the master of Italian horror Mario Bava, both starring the legendary Christopher Lee. First is a gothic melodrama with a lurid undercurrent of sexual perversion: The Whip And The Body from 1963, was made after his early masterpieces of gothic horror Black Sunday and Black Sabbath, and while not as well known, will certainly be a memorable one here on Schlock Treatment.
As a horror tale the gothic elements are amplified: a family riddled with guilt, jealousy, betrayal, not to mention incest and madness. Disgraced nobleman Kurt returns to the family castle to find his brother Christian is marrying his former sex slave (and family member) Nevenka. The family still hasn’t forgiven Kurt for seducing the servant’s daughter Tania who subsequently killed herself. Every member of the family and staff have a motive for killing Kurt, so when he is stabbed through the heart with Tania’s dagger, no one is surprised. That is, until Kurt returns and continues his sado-masochistic obsession with Nevenka from beyond the grave. “Why do you torture me?” she implores a red gel-soaked phantom Kurt, while the family is picked off one by one in the ultimate love-hate death pact. Other people are Hell, it’s often argued, and particularly when it’s your own blood. My advice to the family would be: don’t shit where you eat.
It’s hard to believe this film was made in 1963. There’s a ghoulish amount of blood, not to mention the rotting corpse, but most shocking of all is the beach scene of Kurt whipping Nevenka in a frenzy before making love to her – it’s like From Here To Eternity, Opus Dei style. Lee plays his Sadean archetype with superior menace, a remarkable performance and ripe for rediscovery. The Whip is lacking the starkly memorable presence of Barbara Steele – Daliah Lavi as Nevenka even looks like Steele with her stately manner and wide, tragic eyes, but is sadly no match – and missing the elaborate and truly terrifying setpieces of Black Sabbath, relying instead on tired spookshop techniques like tree branches on windows and secret passageways.
However it’s a minor classic in Bava’s filmography, and stunning to look at. Trained as a cinematographer, Bava sets up each shot like a painting and bathes them in his customary red-and-blue palette. It’s hard to argue it’s art when the film’s so sleazily and joyously B-grade, but I’m sure you’ll agree we’re broadening the definition of “art” tonight with Bava’s kinky shocker The Whip And The Body.
Hercules In The Haunted World
Italy 1961 colour
aka Hercules In The Center Of The Earth, Ercole Al Centro Della Terra, Hercules vs. The Vampires
Directors Mario Bava, Franco Prosperi Writers Mario Bava, Sandro Continenza, Franco Prosperi, Duccio Tessari
Cast Reg Park (Hercules), Christopher Lee (King Lico), Leonora Ruffo (Princess Deianira), George Ardisson (Thesus), Rosalba Neri (Helena)
We backtrack a few years in the Mario Bava filmography to 1961, and an early film for Bava as director. By the time Hercules In The Haunted World was released the sword and sandal (or “peplum”) genre was at its midpoint, with Italian production companies turning out one sausage-meat-squeezed-into-a-human-skinsuit actioner after the other. Only a few rise to the top of the B-film mudpool to be recognized as minor classics, and this, my dear Schlock fiends, is one of them.
The story is pure peplum with little deviation from the rules. Demigod Hercules travels to the kingdom of Ecalia with his friend Theseus to be reunited with his love, the king’s daughter Diarina. After fending off would-be assassins, he arrives to find the king dead and Diarina in a death-like trance under the control of her regent uncle Lyco (a creature described as “the spirit of evil on Earth” played, appropriately enough, by Christopher Lee). The film unfolds as a predictably mythic quest to find a magic rock from Hades, the world of the dead presided over by the god Pluto, to restore Diarina to life.
It all sounds like a hundred muscleman actioners and that’s exactly how we’d remember it without director Mario Bava at the helm. Bava had worked as cinematographer on some of the more strikingly visual sword and sandal films of the late Fifties. Hercules In The Haunted World was his first as director, and despite an embarrassingly low budget to work with, the talented cameraman was able to work miracles. Aside from the creepy studio-bound sets bathed in gels and dry ice, there’s subtle camera movements and breathtaking compositions – take the moment, for instance, when Diarina emerges from her sarcophagus and floats towards Lyco. Then there’s Bava’s trademark macabre touches, like blood seeping from vines holding the souls of the Underworld, and the final journey through Hell is a sight to behold.
British-born Reg Park was a former runner-up to Steve Reeves in the Mr Universe contest before winning the title three times, and so can more than hold his own in the oiled muscleman stakes. As always, Christopher Lee is at his cadaver-like best, playing a semi-dead bloodsucker at the height of his Dracula fame (and pre-empting the film’s alternate title Hercules vs The Vampires). Tragically his distinctive voice dubbed by someone else, and even more disconcerting is his pageboy wig, but these are minor quibbles – it’s a stunning frightfest stapled to a muscleman actioner as we catch Hercules In The Haunted World.
Cast John Scott (Hank Green), Alice Lyon (Elaine Gavin), Allan Laurel (Dr. Gavin), Eulabelle Moore (Eulabelle)
First tonight is a film I used to read about as a kid in the Medved Brothers’ Fifty Worst Movies Of All Time AND in a photo comic that was everywhere in the Seventies – shame the movie wasn’t. The Horror Of Party Beach is the companion film to Curse Of The Living Corpse, filmed back-to-back by director/writer Del Tenney and released as a double bill to huge business on the teen drive-in circuit. It’s a low-budget riff on the then-popular Beach Party movies starring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funacello, with all the essential elements: surf tunes, bikinis, a Von Zipper-less bike gang, the obligatory sand kicked in the hero’s face, and salty corndog one-liners like this:
Beach Babe: “Do you like bathing beauties?”
Surf Jock: “I dunno, I never bathed one.”
There’s all this PLUS the added attraction of some of the dopiest looking gill-things to emerge from a creature feature. It’s tempting to see early echoes of Jaws – but only if you squint like this and wish real hard.
It starts, appropriately enough on a beach, and a love triangle between scientist-surfer Hank, his lush of a girlfriend Tina who’s decided any daylight hour is cocktail hour, and Hank’s boss’ daughter Elaine who’s quietly waiting in the sidelines for Tina to fall off a coral reef – or something like that. Everyone else is ignoring the psychodrama for a sandside danceathon to swinging surf do-whop band The Del Aires, whose deliriously awful repertoire includes the film’s signature tune “Everybody Do The Zombie Stomp”: “Just slam your foot down with an awful bomp. It's the livin' end!” GENIUS.
On the other side of the bay, spilt toxic waste washes over the ocean floor, where a skull (from a pirate skeleton, perhaps?) suddenly grows tissue and limbs – not to mention gills and a sail-fin Mohawk – and rises out of the shallows looking for human blood. Looking like a bulldog-guppy crossbreed doing the Chicken Dance, it could possibly be the only amphibious zombie serial killer in filmdom, featured in an amphibious zombie serial killerBeach Party musical. Not impressed, Medveds? Then hitchhike one-way up your own wazoos.
A pre-hangover Tina’s the first in the creature’s ping pong ball gaze, and before long it’s breeding, either splitting in two or (shudder) by other means. Elaine narrowly misses a pyjama party that turns into a sorority house massacre, while her father and no-longer-mourning beau check their Grade 3 textbooks for possible solutions. Meanwhile the body count rises (though no State of Emergency is called – how convenient!) and the would-be b&w gore is piled on in a coy, early Sixties kind of way. Which makes it more cute than disturbing, more nut-wrenching than gut-wrenching.
It’s preposterous, for sure, and not just because of the fake sciento-babble and bla-bla-rama used to prop up the flimsy excuse for a plot. Most inexplicable is the African-American maid Eulabelle (played by an actress named Eulabelle!), a suspicious sort armed with fuzzy voodoo dolls and who, with her Aunt Jemimah togs, eye rolling, mispronounciatin’ and exclaimations of “Lordy, lord!”, almost single-handedly put the Civil Rights movement right back to the 1860s.
Tenney’s next feature from 1964 sat unreleased on the shelf for seven years, until exploitation showman extraordinaire Jerry Gross paired it with I Drink Your Blood and retitled it I Eat Your Skin. A lurid bookend for a lurid, if unfortunately brief, career, but one that will no doubt be remembered for one film:1963’s The Horror Of Party Beach.
The Lemon Grove Kids Meet the Monsters
USA 1965/69 colour
Directors Ray Dennis Steckler, Peter Balakoff Writers Ray Dennis Steckler, Jim Harmon, Ron Haydock, E.M. Kevke
Cast “Cash Flagg”/Ray Dennis Steckler (Gopher), Mike Kannon (Slug), Carolyn Brandt (Cee Bee Beaumont), Don Snyder (Don), Ron Haydock (Rat Pfink), Herb Robins (Chooper #1)
Some films shown on Schlock Treatment are so out there on their own planet, you need a compass and a detailed guide map to make ANY sense of them. The films of Ray Dennis Steckler are such creatures, and as always, “Andrew, you got some ‘splaining to do!”
Steckler was one of those film guys out on a limb in the Sixties: a film-literate writer-director AND professional cameraman for hire, a real hands-on auteur who preferred working under guerrilla conditions with his trusted family of cast and crew, and with a laissez-faire method of working which allowed him to work without a completed script, sometimes changing the course of a film half-way through shooting. As such, he had complete autonomy which allowed his almost stream-of-consciousness stories to flow unhindered. Always grounded in genre and B-films, however, he had a framework on which to pin these flights of fancy, and at least wrapped in a recognizable package to sell to distributors.
Steckler was also a child of the Forties, and grew up on the charming comedies of the Bowery Boys, and spent much of his adolescene aping Leo Gorcey’s on-screen mugging. On the set of Steckler’s 1965 feature Rat Pfink A Boo Boo, he and actor Mike Cannon, who did a very passable Huntz Hall, concocted the idea of doing a Bowery Boys tribute in colour, and with a mere $2000, filmed the first of three half-hour shorts shown separately in theatres, and later packaged as a feature called The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters. “The Lemon Grove Kids” (c.1965) evokes the innocent spirit and goofy slapstick of the Bowery Boys to a T - or B - from the sped-up silliness, title cards, cartoon rumbles, and the overgrown Lemon Grove Kids themselves led by Steckler, odd-looking at the best of times but here veering off into Neverland with his ham-streaked, grimacing performance (using his usual screen credit “Cash Flagg”) as Gopher.
Filmed several years later, Short Number Two features Mrs Steckler, Carolyn Brandt, in whiteface and fangs in The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Green Grasshopper And The Vampire Lady From Outer Space, and kicks the trio into a new hybrid of Christmas pantomime, home movie, live spook show, and Monkees-meets-Sid and Marty Krofft kiddie TV weirdness. Number Three, The Lemon Grove Kids Go Hollywood (also 1969), is by far the weakest, and instead of Hollywood, goes as far as Steckler’s back yard. Famous actress CeeBee Beaumont is kidnapped by a pair of baddies, and it’s up to Gopher to prove he’s leading man material and save the day. Steckler pitched this as a TV pilot and would have made hundreds of further Lemon Grove shorts if given the opportunity.
It’s hard to work out who exactly his intended audience was: the kiddie matinee crowd, the freak scene (of which we’re all clearly members), or Steckler’s extended family and friends, which comprise most of the cast and crew. Steckler’s then-wife and constant muse Carolyn Brandt appears as the alien Vampire Lady AND reprises her role as actress CeeBee Beaumont from Rat Pfink A Boo Boo; there’s Ron Haydock, Herb Robbins from Thrill Killers, and even Steckler’s kids! And if there was any doubt over the boundaries of Steckler’s self-contained filmic universe, Gopher stumbles through the ending of Rat Pfink, and discovers CeeBee Beaumont’s on the payroll of Steckler-Morgan Productions. It’s the fine balancing act of knowing and naïve, of homage and parody, of purist and personal, that takes Steckler to a unique level of B-film auteurs.
This could be the cleverest, silliest, or most unwatchable film we’ve ever screened on Schlock Treatment. Whatever your viewpoint, you’re probably right – it just is, as we enter the parallel universe of The Lemon Grove Kids Meet The Monsters.
aka Il Re Dei Criminali, L'Invincibile Superman, Superargo
Director “Paul Maxwell”/Paolo Bianchini Writer Julio Buchs
Cast “Ken Wood”/Giovanni Cianfriglia (Superargo), Guy Madison (Professor Wendland), “Liz Barrett”/Luisa Baratto (Gloria Devon), Diana Lorys
Like the United States, Europe has a long tradition of pulp novels and comic strips infiltrating mainstream culture. Unlike much of the output from the States, however, their comics are usually crafted for a more sophisticated adult audience. Thus the kinky body-stockinged superhero became a staple of Euro pulp cinema in the mid Sixties during a time when Batman and Bond set off a string of pop culture explosions around the world.
Superargo was just one of many comic characters brought to the big screen, first in Superargo vs Diabolicus in 1966, and this, its 1968 sequel Superargo And The Faceless Giants. Played by “Ken Wood” aka Giovanni Cianfriglia, a stunt man and bit player in peplum and spy features who graduated to headlining spaghetti westerns, Superargo cuts an impressive figure: a red body stockinged superhero with a perfectly drawn square jaw and comic book eyes staring out from a black leather mask (is that masquerade or bondage chic?). In fact he’s almost identical to the all-black Diabolik, but then the Euro superheroes (Flashman, Argoman, Goldface, Phenomenal) are all just one differently-coloured mask away from melding into a huge amorphous ultrahero.
In Superargo And The Faceless Giants, Ken Wood makes his first appearance in a wrestling ring, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was yet another Santo knockoff from Mexico. In fact this catch-all pulpathon looks and feels like a continental Santo film, with the added Euro flair of sub-Bondian gadgetry and ubervillains, mutant pop art excesses, ludicrous science fiction, and with some remarkably Sixties attributes: his own personal guru, a turbaned fakir named Kamir, the gift of telepathy, and the ability to focus his psychic energy to bend matter at will. Groovy.
He's called in as a freelance agent for the secret service to investigate the case of the missing champions: all world class athletes kidnapped by the clearly insane Professor Wendland and somehow replaced by the titular “faceless giants” – tallish (but not excessively so) robots with pantyhose features and Cybermen cutoffs. His sidekick Claire is also nabbed and brainwashed by the mad Professor into destroying Superargo and thus taking over the world. In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: and so it goes. You've seen it a thousand times before in a thousand configurations, and still it's as much goofy fun as watching Batman as a kid for the very first time.
Batman’s Euro counterparts may have less kitsch and more quiche at their disposal, but it's no less insane, and with its mutant surfadelia and wrestlemania in full swing, I'm sure you're going to go Batshit crazy over Superargo And The Faceless Giants.
War Between The Planets
Italy 1966 colour
aka Planet On The Prowl, “Il Missione Pianeta Errante”/Mission Wandering Planet
Director “Anthony M. Dawson”/Antonio Margheriti Writers Renato Moretti, Ivan Reiner
We’ve screened two of Italian genre specialist Antonio Margheriti’s early science fiction movies before on Schlock Treatment. Tonight’s film is the third in a four-film series Margheriti was contracted to make for US television, then desperate for cost-effective colour B-pictures, in the mid Sixties. It took a staggering three months to shoot the four films simultaneously, using different coloured clapper boards to keep track of actors and props on the constantly-recycled sets. All four films were set around a space station, hence the informal “Gamma One Quadrilogy” tag.
Not surprisingly, given the Italian film industry’s assembly line mentality and Margheriti’s own effects wizardry, the results were not only better than expected, but were deemed far superior to most of the domestic schlock-fi pictures of the time. MGM decided to release the four films theatrically, starting with Wild Wild Planet, before dumping them on the late night TV trashpit.
War Between The Planets - also known as Planet On The Prowl – recycles Margheriti’s plot from Battle Of The Planets. Earth is once again rocked by a series of cataclysmic gravitational disturbances caused, it seems, by a rogue planet. Scientists dispatch a Neutron Deflector to the donut-shaped Gamma One space station, rocked by a much smaller series of catastrophes, a space opera of the soapy kind: Redhaired Lieutenant Sanchez is attracted to angry alpha male Commander Rod Jackson, who’s reluctantly engaged to the General’s clingy and infinitely less likable daughter Janet. Luckily for the rest of mankind they keep their dramatic cocktails on ice until after landing on the Angry Red Planet, an odd duck shooting cold coagulated fat into the atmosphere from its pock-marked surface, firing remote-controlled asteroids (or, in the words of one verbose scientist, “asteroidal manifestations”), and with a single computer brain linked via a series of arteries to the living and breathing heart of the planet itself.
If Kubrick didn’t see this film and flip, I’ll eat my beard: Margheriti’s model work and set design is, for a throwaway B film, simply astounding. On the minus side, the actors wear their pancake makeup like a fat kid at a cake-off, and mouthing the words in English when your first language ain’t Inglese was a bad choice. And someone please strangle the narrator – if I hear one more minor plot point mimeographed in triplicate, I will staple my severest of objections to his chest. (Deep breath) Which is possibly my cue to shut the hell up, as we unleash the planet for the prowl in War Between The Planets.
Cast Lee Van Cleef (Ryan), John Phillip Law (Bill Meceita), Mario Brega (One-Eye), Luigi Pistilli (Walcott), Anthony Dawson (Burt Cavanaugh)
Tonight, revenge is a dish best served cold in a quintessential spaghetti war andwestern double. In the wake of Clint Eastwood’s success, the pale-eyed American actor John Phillip Law headed to Europe to seal his career’s fate. Along with high profile leads in Mario Bava’s Danger Diabolik and the sex-fi spectacular Barbarella, he was cast as the young gunfighter in Death Rides A Horse, and paired with Lee Van Cleef, fresh from his iconic, sardonic roles in Sergio Leone’s For A Few Dollars More and The Good The Bad And The Ugly. It was a huge hit, not only in Europe but America as well. Although strictly a formulaic spaghetti western revenger, it was directed with flair by Giulio Petroni, and with a thick streak of cruelty which, along with Leone’s infamous Dollars trilogy, defined the coming of age of the spaghetti western.
From its opening scene where a young boy’s entire family are violated and killed by a cutthroat gang of criminals, the pace never slackens. Almost immediately it’s fifteen years later, and the young Bill is now a man literally seeing red, his grim face set in concrete, and with a singular reason to stay alive.He soon finds himself tailed by Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), an aging gunfighter just released from jail for taking a fall for the same gang, and realizes it’s payback time for both as they form an uneasy, almost parasitic alliance to track down the gang, now prominent businessmen still profiting from their ill-begotten gains. The impetuous Bill is mirrored perfectly by Ryan lurking in the shadows offering sage, if somewhat jaded, advice. “You got too much hate in you!” says Ryan, and so begins a game in which each player takes turns playing cat and mouse until the bitter end.
It’s a desolate, apocalyptic landscape of sand-scoured skulls and Van Cleef’s sardonic slits cut with crash zooms, machine gun edits and a jarring, almost alien Morricone score - a series of Indian death dirges in which the jazz flute has never sounded more haunting. As far as spaghetti westerns go, 1967 is a good year: fruity, well-bodied and more than a hint of nasty, the 1967 Death Rides A Horse.
Battle Of The Damned
Italy 1969 colour
aka Quella Dannata Pattuglia
Director Roberto Bianchi Montero Writers Roberto Bianchi Montero, Arpad DeRiso
Cast Dale Cummings (Captain Bruce Clay), “Monty Greenwood”/Maurice Poli (Corporal Marwell), “Herbert Andreas”/Herb Andress (German Pilot), Fabio Testi (Pvt. Terry Wilson)
Welcome to hell, Italian war movie style, with a spaghetti actioner from 1969 directed by journeyman director Roberto Bianchi Montero called Battle Of The Damned. Spaghetti war, you ask? Of course! You find a trend worth copying and the Italians were there first and more frequent than anyone. And while the spaghetti western was at its high point, the Italian war film – admittedly a much smaller genre with only (only!) around a hundred titles – more than held its own.
In a plot welded together from "Play Dirty", and "Tobruk", Battle Of The Damned is the tale of an American commando suicide mission headed across the North African desert to blow up a major German fuel depot. Their leader Captain Clay (played by American actor Dale Cummings) has a hair-trigger reputation, which naturally causes concern amongst the other men (including spaghetti western staple Fabio Testi) as they move through the bleak Egyptian exteriors, their mission AND their collective sanities slowly falling to pieces before the film’s explosive (to say the least) finale.
It’s dusty, regulation action with an interesting backdrop and awe-inspiring set design for the underground finale. What more can we say other than have fun when the bullets start to fly in Battle Of The Damned.
First tonight is another film from the king of Japanese martial arts movies, Sonny Chiba. But rather than one of the myriad of Street Fighter clones like much of his Seventies output, The Killing Machine is a period film with a message: a rather cloying message of self-empowerment which gets a little much really quickly. Just stifle your gag reflex and let the skull-cracking begin.
The film opens in the closing days of World War 2. Chiba plays Soh, a Japanese soldier, killer and spy operating behind enemy lines in mainland China. Upon hearing his commander deliver the tragic news of Japan’s surrender, Soh shoots up his office with a machine gun, and yet the burning shame won’t go away. Cut to post-war Japan, and Soh is adrift in a society white-anted by American corruption: jazz clubs, youths in baseball jackets, black marketeers, and the omnipresent GIs as a reminder of the country’s ignoble defeat. The noble Soh, naturally, can’t keep his mouth shut, and cracks a few American skulls; his sympathetic jailer allows him to escape, and he heads to the countryside to start a Shaolin-style dojo, based on the techniques he learned as a spy in China.
Based on a real life Shaolin master who attempted to rebuild Japanese pride through Chinese martial arts, The Killing Machine is essentially a one-character study, thought the film touches on the two women in Sho’s life: Kiku, a young soiled innocent Soh tries to rescue from a life in the gutter, and Miho (played by Sue Sister Street Fighter Shihomi) who, along with her reluctant brother, is one of his dojo’s first pupils.
It’s always interesting to see World War 2 and the Occupation period from a Japanese point of view. But that point of view is hammered home with Chiba’s trademark ham fists and look of righteous indignation under furrowed brillo brows. I’m more interested to know how American audiences might have reacted to such pro-Japanese nationalistic fervour and glaring anti-US sentiment, and to the ever-present swastikas over their kung fu jackets (I know it’s a Eastern mystic symbol, but still…). If you’re longing for the blood and nihilism of the early Street Fighter films, you’re not alone, and that doesn’t make us bad people. Let’s just take a break from the blood and indulge Sonny at his most pompous. It’s time for Chiba Lite with the 1975 The Killing Machine.
Raw Force
USA/Philippines 1982 colour
aka Kung Fu Cannibals, ShogunIsland
Director/Writer Edward D. Murphy
Cast Cameron Mitchell (Captain Harry Dodds), Geoffrey Binney (Mike O'Malley), Hope Holiday (Hazel Buck), Jillian “Kessner”/Kesner (Cookie Winchell), John Dresden (John Taylor), Jennifer Holmes (Ann Davis), Rey King (Go Chin), Carla Reynolds (Eilleen Fox), Carl Anthony (Lloyd Davis), John Locke (Gary Schwartz), Mark Tanous (Cooper), Ralph Lombardi (Thomas Speer), Chanda Romero (Mayloo), Vic Diaz (monk), Mike Cohen
When your writer AND director is the old boy who played the Captain in Mad Doctor of Blood Island, you may take this as an SOS call.
But fear not – Raw Force is out of its mind. In a good way, of course, but is also foaming at the mouth and howling at the moon. Imagine a film shot by Americans in the Philippines exploiting every possible angle: cannibals, zombies, samurais, white kung fu (this WAS 1982, and Chuck Norris reigned supreme!), gumby comedy, and more flesh on display than a Friday night karaoke crawl in Manila.
Executive Producer Larry Woolner used to be a mover and shaker at Dimension Pictures, who handled a few Filipino features for the Seventies drive-in circuit; Raw Force was his last hurrah, and has that weird tension between old-fashioned entertainment and what he believes the kids want to see. As such, there’s old has-beens hobbling next to young never-wills. It’s Porky’s with Sidney Greenstreet and David Carradine, and none of it meshes. But with a mess this entertaining, thank god for senile dementia.
Aging name actor Cameron Mitchell stars as the skipper of a rusty tub bound for the South China Sea and Hope Holliday is Hazel Buck, the boat’s New York jewish owner. On board are the Burbank Karate Club (actually a few no-name TV actors), plus blonde black belt champion Jillian Kessner, who had already played the lead in Cirio H. Santiago’s Firecracker (1981). It’s a motley crew on a crusty Love Boat stocked with degenerates, schmiels, and the brown end of California’s swingers circles.
Onto the ship comes Speer, a nasty German with a Hitler mustache looking for white women to steal, and his karate-kicking cronies. The ship goes up in flames, and the remaining cast and crew are adrift in a life boat before washing up on Warrior’s Island.There they discover Speer has been trading jade for his plane load of tasty-looking nubiles - WarriorsIsland happens to be the home of a renegade group of grinning, clapping cannibal monks who can reanimate the corpses of disgraced martial artists to do their bidding. The girls… well, they happen to be the monks’ main course.
And that’s the set up for one of the strangest kung fu horror sex comedies you will ever witness. Keen-eyed Schlock viewers will recognize the chubby features of the ubiquitous Vic Diaz as one of the head monks, alongside Mike Cohen who Weng Weng fans will recognize as Dr Kohler in For Your Height Only. All I can say right now is slip the brain into neutral and enjoy, and if you ever needed proof that the Philippines exists in a parallel universe in which our laws of taste, logic and sanity are turned on their heads, it’s this: the 1982 Raw Force.
Cast Don Megowan (Capt. Kenneth Cragis), Erica Elliott (Maxine Megan), Don Doolittle (Dr. Raven), George Milan (Acto, a clicker), Dudley Manlove (Lagan, a clicker)
Schlock Treatment viewers will remember Dudley Manlove as the slightly effeminate alien captain in Plan 9 From Outer Space. “Plan 9… ah yes, the resurrection of the dead!” Manlove is also in tonight’s first film playing a renegade robot, but if you’re expecting Ed Wood Jr, think again: The Creation Of The Humanoids means serious business, a dystopian vision of Social Darwinism and a philosophical musing on faith and morality. Well, it tries on its meagre resources, and because of its over-reaching ambitions, is one of the most eccentric and out-there science fiction films of the Sixties.
“It did happen,” the narrator informs us, “the Atomic War.” Over 90% of humanity is wiped out, and those left on the planet rely on over a billion worker droids to do their bidding. There’s the Clickers, freakish looking grey-skinned humanoids with pinball eyes intelligent and almost human enough to be employed as live-in lovers. They even have a pseudo-religion, a computer mainframe known to them as the Father/Mother”Then there’s the Order of Flesh and Blood, a quasi-masonic religion and secret police rolled into one, who are concerned about their dwindling control over the planet. Enter Captain Craigus, a Flesh and Blooder investigating the clickers’ plan to create a super-robot, one human enough to circumvent the Prime Law and be able to kill – or at least clone humanity out of existence.
A deathly serious movie masquerading as a cheap B picture, it attempts the grand ideas of a science fiction novel. What does it mean to be human – to lie, and to kill? Who or what is God, and what is a soul? It’s a distillation of the collected works of Isaac Asimov, right down to his Three Robotic Laws, with shades of Blade Runner (only twenty years before the film, and six years before Dick’s novel!). However hard it tries, however, it can’t hide its B film budget, and is dialogue-heavy at the expense of the visuals, somewhat limited to its grey sets (to match the humanoids) with startling splashes of reds and blues. Pretentious and utterly original, and with a Phillip K. Dick ending worth the occasional snooze over, we’re proud to present the 1962 Creation Of The Humanoids.
Mesa Of Lost Women
USA 1953 b&w
aka Lost Women, Lost Women Of Zarpa
Directors Ron Ormond, Herbert Tevos Writer Herbert Tevos
Cast Jackie Coogan (Dr. Aranya), Allan Nixon (Dr. Tucker, camp physician), Richard Travis (Dan Mulcahey, foreman), Lyle Talbot (Narrator), Mary Hill (Doreen Culbertson), Robert Knapp (Grant Phillips), Tandra Quinn (Tarantella), Harmon Stevens (Dr. Leland J. Masterson), Nico Lek (Jan van Croft), Dolores Fuller (Blonde 'Watcher in the Woods')
Next - what started out as “Lost Women Of Zarpa” ended up on the shelf for several years until it was bought by Ron “If Footmen Tire You…” Ormond, wrapped in extra scenes and released it as “Mesa Of Lost Women”. It’s hard to see where the old footage ends and the new footage begins – in fact every scene barely hangs together, it’s like a patchwork quilt held together by moth spit and fading hope.
It starts in a fairly straightforward fashion - two lost souls wander endlessly across the Muerto Desert as the Narrator informs us it means “the desert…of death!” before launching into a rant about the war the bipeds – that’s us pathetic humans – and the hexapods. What could he mean? Well, pathetic humans, all will be revealed soon enough…
Once rescued, the male, pilot Grant Phillips, manages to spit out his story of “supermonsters… superbugs” to an incredulous foreman, but Pepe the sympathetic Mexican is a believer. The Narrator then talks directly to Pepe and flashes him back even before Grant’s story to an earlier one: that of Dr Masterson, leading organotherapist, visiting the famed scientist Dr Aranya, in his Mesa hideout in the Mexican mountains. There he finds actor Jackie Coogan, former child actor, future Uncle Fester and now single name actor in Mesa… with a bung eye and mole the size of a German cockroach perched on his face, and his experiments in crossbreeding humans and spiders using venom from an enormous spider puppet he keeps in his closet.
The women are gorgeous, decked out in diaphanous gowns and Bo Derek wigs, but the males end up as dwarves, “puny” and “insignificant”. The wills of both sexes are controlled by Aranya, whose ambitions are (not surprisingly) to take over the world. Masterson has an attack of conscience and tells Aranya he’s insane.“Gibberish!” (not jibberish) Aranya yells back, and does something off-camera to Masterson to send him straight to the Meurto State Asylum.
Cut to the Muerto Cantina, in which rich guy Van Croft and his unimpressed fiancée Doreen watch one of Aranya’s most successful creations Tarantella do her spidery dance of seduction before she’s dispatched by a wiggy, gun-toting Masterson whose male nurse informs everyone he’s not supposed to be outside his rubber room, and is not the full tray of sausages. Masterson forces Van Croft’s group and his pilot – ah, finally Grant’s story begins! Welcome, old son - at gunpoint to fly over the MuertosDesert, only to crashland in Aranya’s Mesa that’s crawling with his experiments.
And that’s just the beginning of a classic bad (and I mean BAAAAAD) film that seems much longer than its seventy minute running time, though you’ll wish it would never end. If the preposterous narration sounds like Orson Welles reading an Ed Wood Jr script, you’re close – it’s actually Wood regular Lyle Talbot. And the Ed Wood Jr connections don’t just end there; that’s also Wood’s girlfriend and erstwhile leading lady Dolores Fuller as the 'Watcher in the Woods'. Like Wood’s films there’s a jaw-dropping weirdness and delirium about the proceedings that’s utterly addictive, and always – ALWAYS! – that fluttering, stuttering flamenco guitar in the background that’ll send you right to the Muerto State Asylum (“the asylum…of death!”). Superbugs, Superbad, Superfreaky – it’s the 1953 Mesa Of Lost Women.
Tonight on our final Schlock Treatment are two of the most blatant film thefts of the Twentieth Century – the Japanese Planet Of The Apes, and the Filipino Rambo: First Blood Part 2. Our first crime is Time Of The Apes, originally a kid’s TV serial from 1974 that ran for 24 episodes before American distributor Sandy Frank took the shears to it and carved up a ninety minute feature that miraculously seems as long as every one of those 24 episodes.
It opens with two little wholesome tykes, Johnny and Caroline, on their way to visit their kindly Uncle Charlie, a friendly and disturbingly benign scientist, at his laboratory, where his experiments in “cold sleep” involve the freezing and thawing of monkeys, and ultimately human beings. Uncle Charlie’s cute monkeys in cages and on the surgical tables take on a more sinister edge when a volcano erupts, and the children and their chaperone Miss Catherine are forced into freezer pods – only to be thawed out God knows how many hundreds of years later. And the figures doing the unfreezing are not scientists in monkey suits – they’re monkeys in human suits!
The human intruders are considered a threat by the angry Police Chief Gaybar (do you think he might be angry about his name? Hmm….). And so begins an endless chase to GreenMountain and beyond – Gaybar’s police goons versus the humans, with the help of the last human rebel Godo (cue love interest for the teen Miss Catherine) and an overly trusting spider monkey-child in a striped shirt named Pepe. There’s a flying saucer, a talking computer, and a whole planet load of question marks – how? For whom? And ultimately – why, oh Monkey God, why?
Yes, it’s a retarded riff on the entire Planet Of The Apes film series, but with jokestore masks so cheap the mouths barely move, so that the actors have to shake their heads or fists during their dialogue. And what exquisite dialogue! Redubbed in the same hamfisted and blatantly offensive way Sandy Frank Americanized his Gamera the Flying Turtle acquisitions, and with the same obnoxious voices, thus rendereding the child actors even more unbearable. “I don’t want to killed by a monkey!” screams little Johnny – not if I get to you first. It’s like that film Idiocracy, with an emphasis on “idiot” – the 1987 reworking of the 1974 Time Of The Apes.
No Blood No Surrender
Philippines 1986 colour
Director Rudy Dominguez Writer Ernie Ortega
Cast Palito (Samson), Panchito, Max Alvarado (Mayor Mercado), Ernie Ortega (Police Chief), Ruben Ramos, [uncredited] Fernando Poe Jr
Our final ever film for Schlock Treatment is also one of the greatest crimes we’ve ever committed on you, our loyal viewers. As our swansong we head to back the Philippines one last time for an anorexic Rambo rip-off called No Blood No Surrender.
Third-tier comedian Palito (that’s Tagalog for “matchstick”) was just one of many familiar faces from Filipino films of the Seventies and Eighties, a former vaudeville performer usually in bit roles in Fernando Poe Jr and Tito, Vic and Joey movies. In a country renowned for its far-from-subtle humour, his schtick was simple –like a taller and much, much thinner Weng Weng, his anorexic frame cast him as a human dishrag or walking corpse, usually with a bandage around his head. Not surprisingly, the walking corpse routine never got old – or in two words, “Comedy Mould”.
In the mid Eighties, when Palito was well into his fifties, he finally made it to star billing in a series of parodies of Hollywood hits. Following a stint supporting Redford White in the First Blood riff Johnny Rambo Tango (1985), Palito would become the Philippines next stick-thin Sylvester Stallone in not one but TWO Rambo clones, in which Palito would run around the Filipino jungle, arms like twigs, clutching an enormous hunting knife, and a rocket launcher that’s twice his width!
In No Blood No Surrender, Palito plays Samson, a mysterious Vietnam vet wandering into a small town looking for the daughter of his dead army buddy Hercules (Samson? Hercules?). Immediately he raises the ire of Mayor Mercado (played by Filipino supervillain Max Alvarado) who, with his private army of goons, wants to take the daughter’s house away from her. He’s driven out of town several times, only to return madder than ever. Samson’s former commander (popular comedian Dolphy’s sidekick Panchito, playing the Richard Crenna role) comes looking for him, and explains away Samson’s insane rampage (“I trained him…ex Vietnam”). ‘Nam may have been hell, but the Philippines is worse – much worse – with an angry stick insect on the loose.
Imagine the horror of an action fan settling down to watch Palito’s apocalyptic redux of First Blood. No Blood… is an apt name, and not just because of its corpse-like connotations; it can’t make up its mind if it’s a spoof or the real deal, and although the film has its fair share of gun battles and explosions, and an unbilled cameo by Fernando Poe Jr as “famous actor Sylvester Stallone” (!!), it fails as both. It does however work on a much higher, more surreal level, whereby the innate weirdness of Filipino goon comedies such as this and Weng Weng’s movies leave you floored, slack-jawed and wanting more.
Like hundreds of Filipino-made films of the Eighties, including Johnny Rambo Tango, the film was dubbed into English and successfully sold overseas to the ever-hungry, ever-mewing VHS market.
Another enterprising local producer attempted to go to the well a third time and cast Palito as Ram-Buto or “Ram-Bone” – unfortunately for all concerned, the well was dry, and Palito stayed on the local film industry’s hamster wheel. Jonrox Films gave him a shot at filming another of his popular characters the following year, James Bone: Agent 001 (1987), this time directed by No Blood…’s Ruben Ramos. I heard a rumour James Bone and Weng Weng appeared in a film together for Weng Weng’s producer Peter Caballes, but when I finally tracked down Palito in Manila to ask him, he couldn’t recall for sure (no doubt due to the Philippines' collective amnesia when it comes to their own cinema). He does remember doing numerous vaudeville stage shows with Weng Weng throughout the Eighties, where the sight of an anorexic beating on a midget would have been regarded as "champagne comedy". Palito is to this day STILL starring in Filipino movies, still on the hamster wheel, and still beating the same “walking corpse” schtick.
And so ends the tale of No Blood No Surrender AND Schlock Treatment. We thank you for two years of loyal viewing, and look forward to presenting more films in our next incarnation. Until then, its Adios from myself, Scott Black the man behind the mask, and Palito as all we put the “oh” into Rambo with No Blood No Surrender.
aka The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Terrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, The Terror of Dr. Hichcock, L’Orribile Segreto del Dr. Hichcock Director “Robert Hampton”/Riccardo Freda Writer “Julyan Perry”/Ernesto Gastaldi
Cast Barbara Steele (Cynthia Hichcock), Robert Flemyng (Professor Bernard Hichcock), “Montgomery Glenn”/Silvano Tranquilli (Dr. Kurt Lowe), “Teresa Fitzgerald”/Maria Teresa Vianello (Margherita Hichcock), Harriet “White”/Medin (Martha the maid)
Good evening, and welcome to an Schlock Treatment All Italia special with two films from horror specialist Riccardo Freda.
We’ve often remarked here on Schlock Treatment just how far ahead the Europeans were in the Sixties in their portrayal of on-screen sex and violence. There’s usually a perverse undercurrent that’s also lacking in horror films from America and Britain at the time, and The Horrible Dr Hichcock from 1962, a necrophilic reimagining of The Premature Burial with all of Poe’s morbid sexuality intact, is the perfect case in point.
English actor Robert Flemyng plays the title role with gusto as the Victorian professor with a penchant for women who are… well, let’s just say they he doesn’t like them to move a lot. His first wife Margherita passes away as a result of one of his sexual experiments gone horribly wrong. Years later the Professor’s new bride Cynthia (a rare sympathetic role for British scream queen Barbara Steele) arrives at Hichcock’s mansion to find nothing has been touched since Margherita’s death, including her coffin in the family crypt jealously guarded by her black cat Jezebel, and Cynthia starts feeling the first wife’s presence everywhere. To make matters worse, her husband has turned emotionally and physically cold, spends a lot of time in the hospital morgue, and her milk is starting to taste a little strange…
Hichcock’s director Riccardo Freda was a true craftsman held in the same regard as other horror specialists Mario Bava and Dario Argento, if not as well known. His horror films even predate Bava’s; the 1956 I Vampiri, released overseas as The Devil’s Commandment, started the Italian gothic cycle, and although working in every conceivable genre, Freda would return to horror with perhaps his signature works, this and its follow-up The Ghost from 1963, also starring Barbara Steele. In Bava’s Black Sunday and Freda’s The Horrible Dr Hichcock, Steele was never better, and as the tortured bride Cynthia her iconic features dominate the screen, looming out of shadowy passages and gothic sets drenched in red lighting as her stunning eyes convey her unravelling sanity. Add Freda’s meticulous framing and attention to detail, and we have one of the true masterpieces of Italian horror, the 1962 The Horrible Dr Hichcock.
The Witch’s Curse
Italy 1962 colour
aka Maciste In Hell, Maciste All’Inferno
Director “Robert Hampton”/Riccardo Freda Writers Oreste Biancoli, Ennio De Concini, Eddy H. Given, Piero Pierotti
Our second film tonight is one of those bizarre hybrids we like to screen on Schlock Treatment. A few weeks ago we screened Hercules In The Haunted World, a Mario Bava film in which Hercules descends into the nightmarish world of the undead. Just to prove Herculean horrors are not a one-shot genre, we have Riccardo Freda’s reply, in which Hercules goes to hell – via Scotland – in the 1962 The Witch’s Curse.
The film starts in 1550 in the tiny Scottish village of Loch Laird, at the burning of the local witch Martha Gaunt, once courted by judge Parrish in her youth but now condemned to the stake. A hundred years later Martha’s final uttered curse appears to be driving the town’s young women to hang themselves at a certain tree, forcing the local burgomeister to declare them witches and burn them anyway. When the great-great granddaughter with the unfortunate name of Martha Gaunt is thrown in a dungeon awaiting execution (just in case, you understand), Hercules - or, as he’s dubbed, his original Italian title Machiste - makes an appearance in his loin cloth and sandals, looking like he’s not only a long way but a long TIME from home, with no-one seeming to give a rancid haggis either way. Machiste proves he’s more than walnuts in a sausage suit by setting out to lift the witch’s curse, ripping up the hanging tree and descending into Hell through the hole underneath, where he battles an ogre, a stampede of cattle, and the temptations of a young blonde witchy woman who may very well be the Cursing One herself.
It’s an absurd combination of genres with some of the worst Scottish accents committed to film (including that one!), which at times gives you Monty Python And The Holy Grail flashbacks: “She’s a witch! May we burn her?” Like Hercules In The Haunted World, The Witch’s Curse is Hell on a shoestring, and even that’s starting to smoulder, but ever the artist-as-filmmaker, Freda tries to give more than a smoke-and-cardboard spookshow and if you look past the ludicrous stuffed lion, for the most part he succeeds. In fact the weakest link in the film is Maciste himself, Kirk Morris (real name Adriano Bellini), a blonde Elvis lookalike and former gondolier from Venice whose presence in over a dozen Hercules or Sons of Hercules features is the closest thing resembling cardboard, and whose wretched look of strain and pain when picking up boulders is the same one he has delivering his dialogue. A Herculean effort, but it’s back up the canal for you my son.
Hardly a classic, but a weirdly memorable peplum and Black Sunday knockoff nonetheless, Schlock Treatment once again descends into the bowels of hell with the 1962 The Witch’s Curse.
aka Santo y Blue Demon Contra El Doctor Frankenstein, Santo y Blue Demon Contra El Doctor Frankestein
Director Miguel M. Delgado Writers Francisco Cavazos, Alfredo Salazar
Cast Santo (himself), Blue Demon (himself), Sasha Montenegro (Alicia Robles), Jorge Russek (Dr. Irving Frankenstein), Ivonne Govea (Marta), Carlos Suárez (Henchman), Rubén Aguirre (Dr. Genaro Molina), Jorge Casanova (Dr. Mora)
Hola, bastardos, and welcome to yet another Mexican wrestling/horror double bill here on Schlock Treatment. After the break is the return of the German Robles in The Vampire’s Coffin, but first is a masked wrestling horror with a villain so dastardly it takes two masked wrestling superheroes to battle him: in Santo And Blue Demon vs Dr Frankenstein.
Our Man in the Silver Mask had already met the entire set of Universal Monsters in previous outings, including the Frankenstein monster in Santo And Blue Demon vs The Monsters (1970) AND the prodigy herself in Santo vs Frankenstein’s Daughter (1972). The producers decided it was time to meet the great man himself, and in 1974 paired long-time wrestling compadres Santo and Blue Demon against a very hip Dr Irving Frankenstein. He claims to be 113 years old yet he’s kept up with fashions – pimped out in a jacket and pink shirt, he looks more like a club owner than scientist. And, armed with an anti-aging formula most grizzled old scientists would kill to get their claws on, he plans on perfecting his brain transplant operations to resurrect his bride, stored on ice for the last 80 years.
All work and no hoy-hoy has made Frankenstein a very unstable sociopath indeed. The slew of missing girls end up dead on his operating table, but he’s fine with that; he’s just that bit closer in his experiments. Then, to rub salt in society’s wounds, he reanimates their bodies and sends them back home – like homing corpses! Frankenstein does have one successful experiment, however, and he plans to transplant Santo’s brain into “Mortis”, his radio-controlled seven foot Golem, by kidnapping Santo’s would-be girlfriend Alicia and holding him to ransom. Part of the hairbrained scheme involves a wrestling match between Santo and Mortis, with Frankenstein as his masked manager! Propped up by the nutty Professor Ruiz and a pair of undercover cupcakes, this is just one of three Santo matches, in their extended three-round glory – indulgent, to be sure, but the Mexican audiences would be falling off their seats as readily as the studio-bound crowd, while the announcer almost swallows his microphone screaming choruses of “Aye aye aye!”
This preposterous latter-day Santo adventure is as colourful as its hideous Seventies décor, with an eccentric jazz and lounge score completely at odds with the onscreen action. Lucha Libre purists prefer the classic black and white period over the increasingly silly colour films, in which atmosphere and a modicum of subtlety are traded in for rubber masks, flared collars and cheap yuks. Well, I say “pish” and “pah!” as well unfold a very entertaining chapter in the annals of Mexican masked wrestling horror cinema: Santo And Blue Demon vs Dr Frankenstein.
The Vampire’s Coffin
Mexico 1958 b&w
aka El Ataúd del Vampiro
Director Fernando Méndez Writers Ramón Obón, Raúl Zenteno
Cast Abel Salazar (Dr. “Henry Hetherford”/Enrique Saldívar), Ariadna Welter (“Martha”/Marta González), Germán Robles(Count Karol de Lavud), Yeire Beirute (“Manson”/Baraza), Alicia Montoya (María Teresa), Guillermo Orea, Carlos Ancira (Dr. Marion)
A few months ago we screened the classic 1957 Mexican horror film The Vampire, a wonderfully atmospheric Hispanic variation on the old Universal Dracula films that even beat Hammer’s hugely influential The Horror Of Dracula by a year.In Mexico The Vampire was a smash as well, prompting the producer/star Abel Salazar to crank out a sequel post-haste, and the result, 1958’s The Vampire’s Coffin, is thankfully more than just an opportunistic, by-the-numbers rehash of the original.
In The Vampire, Salazar plays Dr Henry, an undercover vampire hunter on the trail of European count Lavud (essayed with effortless aplomb by Mexico’s own Christopher Lee, German Robles), now comfortably entrenched in a Mexican hacienda with one eye on resurrecting his dead vampire brother, and the other on local beauty Martha (played by Ariadna Welter), whom he plans to make his vampiric bride for all eternity. Naturally Lavud is dispatched with a stake through his heart, Henry and Martha disappear into the sunset arm in arm, and all appears right with the world. Which, we all know, is disastrous for a potential sequel – time for us stupid humans to screw things up.
The Vampire’s Coffin opens with Dr Henry and Martha both working and both still flirting with each other in a nearby hospital. Hearing of the legend of Count Lavud, Henry’s colleague Dr Marion pays Manson, a predatory body snatcher, to steal Lavud’s coffin so he can unravel the scientific mysteries of vampirism first hand and strip back superstition - literally - to its bare bones. Manson has other ideas, however, and returns for Lavud’s clasp, draws out the stake, and is now a willing slave to his vampire master. Naturally Lavud heads straight for Martha to fulfil the promise in the first film, who he claims history has marked as his betrothed. Henry, meanwhile, has to explain to the hospital director he’s lost a cadaver AND a vampire in the one casket.
What could have been an crass and utterly unnecessary sequel thankfully expands on The Vampire, taking the action out of its village setting to a hospital, and then to the memorable finale cutting between an elaborate theatre set and a waxworks museum filled with instruments of death and torture. German Robles as Count Lavud is as coldly aristocratic as ever, but like Christopher Lee in Hammer’s Dracula sequels, is given less to do, and without the first film’s character development is in danger of becoming a one-dimensional bogeyman. It’s only a minor sticking point, as is the usually meticulous dubbing from American distributor K Gordon Murray which here borders on Hercules Returns. Ultimately it’s a fine sequel, not in the “classic” status of the original but in the hands of Salazar, Robles and co, an enjoyable romp of a Hispanic horror flick: it’s time to crack open the 1958 The Vampire’s Coffin.
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Our Turkish feature tonight is another glorious plundering of late 70s Hollywood, and you have to admire the tenacity of a producer trying to do a Hollywood special effects blockbuster for the price of a can of crab juice. It’s Supermen Return, or affectionately known as The Turkish Superman, featuring a man of steel so odd looking and so expressionless you’d swear he was one of those hypno-dolls hiding behind an enormous pair of toy spectacles.
Is it as bad as it sounds? Well, that depends on your concept of awful. Let’s just say it’s deliriously bad, in the best possible way, and for all its cheapdash chicanery and assiness, it does have an effective moment or two of action. You haven’t lived, people, till you’ve seen the Turkish Superman rear projected onto a dark room full of Christmas decorations, or heard distorted music thieved from at least six James Bond films – and of course the 1978 Superman. Seriously, if Christopher Reeves was alive today he’d be spinning in his wheelchair, and that’s exactly what your head will be doing as we head with capes flying into Turksploitation country with The Turkish Superman.
Primitives
It’s hard to believe that a devoutly religious country such as 
Meanwhile the Italians were running around South East Asia creating their own 
Deodato’s plot is plundered mercilessly right down to identical scenes and you could almost swear certain shots. Without the director’s flair, however, the entire exercise is stripped back to its basest of elements, though shots of natives chewing the heads off lizards and a mother chewing through her own umbilical cord are made slightly less lurid by the film’s 
